Character makes Savage return to comics

Doc Savage is making his way back to comics. The once wildly popular pulp character co-stars with Batman in the one-shot “Batman/Doc Savage” this week.

Brian Azzarello (“100 Bullets”) is the writer of the “Batman/Doc Savage” Special, illustrated by Phil Noto.

Doc Savage has a long history in comic books, pulp magazines, radio and even movies.

Moore author Mel Odom said Doc Savage was among his favorites as a youngster.

“I grew up on the character — tougher than Tarzan, braver than Batman,” he said. “(I) took my younger brothers to see the 1975 George Pal ‘Doc Savage’ movie.”

And Doc Savage could return to the silver screen as well. Aintitcoolnews.com recently reported Shane Black (“Lethal Weapon”) was working on a Doc Savage script.

Through his worldwide jaunts, Doc Savage came at least twice to the Sooner State.

“At least two Doc novels take place in Oklahoma, ‘The Secret in the Sky,’ May 1935, and ‘The Derrick Devil,’ February 1937,” said Larry Latham, pulp fiction expert and creator of the “Lovecraft Is Missing” Web comic.

Doc Savage was an adventurer and scientist who had globe-spanning adventures with his band of assistants.

Lester Dent wrote most of the 181 novels featuring Doc Savage, which were released under the Street & Smith “house name” of Kenneth Robeson. And Dent had even closer ties to Oklahoma than his “Man of Bronze” character.

Though Dent was born in La Plata, Mo., Latham said Dent lived and worked in Oklahoma from 1925 to late 1930, in Bartlesville, Ponca City, Chickasha and Tulsa.

“In Tulsa, he worked for The Associated Press office at the Tulsa World,” Latham said in an e-mail. Latham said articles by Will Murray, Dent’s literary executor and biographer and a personal friend of Dent’s wife, Norma, indicated that during this time Dent was an avid reader of the pulp magazines.

“He worked midnight to 8 a.m. and read a lot of pulps,” Latham said. “One of his co-workers, Lester Foster, sold a story, and so Dent took up writing as a way to make some extra money.”

He wrote 13 stories before selling his first to Street & Smith in 1929, living in Tulsa and working at The Associated Press, and also as a telegrapher at a Tulsa stock brokerage until 1930.

Dell Publishing in New York offered Dent a full-time job writing in late 1930, Latham said, and the Dents moved there. Not too long after, Street & Smith hired him to write Doc Savage.

In addition to Doc Savage, Dent wrote a variety of other pulp genres before his death on March 11, 1959. But there was one genre of which he wasn’t particularly fond.

Murray quotes him as saying: “I was raised on a ranch. Now wouldn’t I be crazy to go writing about something I knew all about?”

by Matthew Price
From Friday’s The Oklahoman

Comments

No comments yet.

Leave a comment